How to Remove/Uninstall Conduit Search and Toolbar

When installing certain programs like uTorrent (which is a Bittorent client), they may install a toolbar. The toolbar is branded as “Bittorent toolbar” but the company besides this is Conduit. Many people are facing problems in uninstalling this Conduit search engine and toolbar. Conduit is the company that makes configurable toolbars that can be integrated by such applications.

When searching on the web, it seems that Conduit community toolbar is the root of all problems. This toolbar gets installed when we install some program and then even after uninstalling conduit toolbar, the search engine does not gets removed. For e.g. there’s a search bar placed next to address bar in Firefox. When we search on this search bar, Google search engine is used. But after installing this Conduit toolbar, the search is performed using Conduit. Now this is really a strange and nagging problem. Why would anyone want to search with this Conduit engine, when we can use Google, right?

Lets remove this Conduit Community Toolbar. Click the “Start” button and then select “Control Panel > Add/Remove Programs”. From here, try to find the toolbar name and uninstall it. The toolbar name may depend on programs name for e.g. Bittorent toolbar. Find and remove the toolbar.

Now check your browser again. Is that nagging software removed? If not, then read on.

For Chrome Users
Start Chrome and enter this in address bar: chrome://extensions/. Find the toolbar name and click on “remove”.

For Firefox Users
Start Firefox. Click on Tools > Options. From the General tab and under Home Page, make sure that Conduit is not set as your home page. If so, remove it and set some other website as home page.

To set your default search engine, click on small down arrow in search bar. This should open a small drop down menu. Click on “Manage Search Engines”. If you find Conduit there, then select it and click on “Remove” button. Set a new default search engine and click on OK. Does this solve your problem? If not, then continue with below steps.

Steps to Remove Conduit Search Engine

Please follow the below steps only if you’re using Mozilla Firefox.

1. Start Firefox, and go to Tools > Add-ons (shortcut key: Ctrl+Shift+A). From the plugins and extensions section, remove anything related to Conduit. Restart Firefox and check if the toolbar and conduit search engine has been removed. If not, then proceed to step 2.
2. Now in the address bar, type about:config. You’ll be presented with a notification box.



3. Click on “I’ll be careful, I promise!” button.
4. In the filter bar, type “conduit“.
5. From the preference name field, locate this: CT1060933.TBHomePageUrl and double click on it to modify the value. Change it to:

   http://www.google.com/search?lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=

6. Now locate another preference name field, keyword.URL , double click on it and change the value to:

   http://www.google.com/search?lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=

7. After making these changes, restart Firefox.

How to protect yourself from these toolbars? A simple solution would be to be careful when installing programs. Make sure you “uncheck” the option to install the toolbar. They don’t just install toolbar, but also change default search engine and also change the home page.